Sign up for Riskgaming events in DC and NYC On Oct 29 & 30
Lux will host two preview runthroughs of our newest Riskgaming scenario, “DeepFaked and DeepSixed: AI Election Security and the Future of Democracy” just in time for the U.S. elections. The dates are October 29 at 6-8pm in New York City and October 30 at 5-7pm in Washington D.C. This scenario was previously covered by Dan De Luce and Kevin Collier at NBC News, and I am happy to finally see it published publicly.
If you would like to sign up and be invited to participate, please read more and fill out our short form. We’d love to have you join us!
Introducing Laurence Pevsner
I’m very excited to announce that Laurence Pevsner is joining us as our Director of Programming for Riskgaming here at Lux Capital. You’ll notice that we are finally scheduling Riskgaming runthroughs again, and that isn’t a coincidence: Laurence is taking charge of producing our Riskgaming experiences. That includes the most important aspect that makes these games the successes that they are: selecting and bringing together extraordinary groups of people who are prepared to encounter complex science, technology and policy issues and compete to win.
Laurence comes to us most recently from the City University of New York, where he was a Moynihan Public Scholar, and before that, he was the Director of Speechwriting for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. He’s also an incredibly avid science-fiction reader and is working on a book as well.
In Defense of the UN. Or: The UN Promotes Peace by Letting Us Yell At Each Other
This column is written by our new Director of Programming, Laurence Pevsner.
It’s been two weeks since the world’s leaders descended upon New York City to mix and mingle in Turtle Bay, clog up Manhattan’s already non-congestion-priced-streets, and party with Presidents Biden and Zelenskyy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The United Nation’s annual High-Level Week, known as UNGA, is New York’s yearly reminder that we are not just the world’s capital for finance, media, culture, publishing, and pizza. We are also, quite literally, home to the headquarters of the only governing body that unites the world.
But at this moment, the UN hardly feels united, and New Yorkers don’t seem particularly proud to be its host city. All the anecdotal grumbling I heard matches the data: the UN’s popularity went down by five percent among Americans in the past year alone, and declined by even more in the UK, Israel, Nigeria, Mexico, France, South Africa, Germany, and Sweden, to name a few.
It’s no wonder why. The UN failed to prevent the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — and can’t seem to end them, either. The body has failed to set up real international guard rails for the development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. One of the UN’s signature achievements — the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons — looks in retrospect like a poor decision by Ukraine, and Iran is now on the precipice of expanding the nuclear country count. If they do, a slew of other countries are likely to follow.
Meanwhile, man-made famines and curable diseases continue to plague civilians. There’s been no unified response to the climate crisis. And on development, the UN set ambitious goals for 2030–and by their own reckoning are on track to meet a meager 17% of them.
What, exactly, is there for UN defenders to be proud of?
I think, controversially, quite a lot.
Let me start with an acknowledgment: I have some personal experience — some might say bias — when it comes to this topic. Before I joined Lux Capital as our new Director of Programming, I spent two and a half years working at the United Nations as the Director of Speechwriting for the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. That role gave me a firsthand view into the inner machinations of the UN, warts and all.
I saw plenty to critique. Money designated for important causes went wasted. Corruption was too common. Certain issues and countries received too much attention, others too little. The Security Council system is structurally designed to be undemocratic and biased toward the Permanent Five (P5) members (China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States). And there was far, far too much bureaucracy and internecine squabbling over tiny language disputes in committees and on resolutions no one outside the UN system cared about.
But aside from a few exceptionally bad actors, for the most part, what I saw were people working very hard under very difficult constraints and countervailing incentives to bring about as much peace and prosperity as humanly possible.
The key phrase being “humanly possible.” In American politics, it’s cliche to quote President James Madison, that “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The equivalent at the UN is Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s famous line: “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” Both quotes are so sticky because they point to a deep truth: our political systems should be measured against the reality of humanity.
With that in mind, it’s my view that most disappointment in the United Nations comes not from its own failures but our failed expectations. The UN shouldn’t be measured against the yardstick of a utopian world government that waves a wand and delivers world peace. In Riskgaming, we preach that every decision represents a tradeoff. You think the UN isn’t great — fine. What’s your alternative?
One option is just to abandon multilateralism entirely. Funnily enough, we just conducted a mini-experiment to that effect during the Trump administration, which notably pulled out of the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and the Paris Climate Accords, among other multilateral agreements. It was White House policy to take a step back from the UN and divert our resources and attention elsewhere.
The result: China saw an opening and pounced. They staffed themselves and their allies in senior positions across the UN. To quote my former boss, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, during our absence “China planted its ideological language in countless UN resolutions. They have shaped agendas, mechanisms, and mandates in their favor. They did this quietly; but it is hard to overstate the significance of these advancements.” If your competitor is eager to pick up what you’ve put down, perhaps you’ve underestimated its value.
Another common retort is that instead of multilateralism, we should pivot toward so-called “minilateralism.” This is the argument that small, informal blocs like the Quad (Australia, India, the United States, and Japan) or BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates) can offer more nimble diplomatic solutions for their members.
These can potentially be powerful supplemental groups to achieve shared goals, but they can’t match the convening power of the UN. The Quad cannot galvanize 143 countries to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine or represent the diplomatic heft that comes with that broad-spectrum approbation. And Ethiopia’s fellow BRICS nations will likely not save Ethiopia from its next famine. In 2021, Russia provided less than $63 million to the World Food Program. China, the richest BRICS country, provided less than $27 million. The United States provided nearly $4 billion. If you’re Ethiopia, are you really willing to give up access to your biggest humanitarian funder?
More broadly, minilateralism forgets the UN’s most fundamental purpose: to prevent World War III. The UN forum offers a safety valve for when things get testy. It gives diplomats a public and official place to yell at each other — thereby proving to their home populations that they have responded in some forceful and meaningful way — without using tools that can hurt civilians, like deploying missiles or sanctions. The UN averts violence by providing a forum for countries to yell at each other, save face, and move on.
A common critique is that while the lack of all-encompassing conflict is nice, shouldn’t we hope for more? Wouldn’t a better UN, freed from the shackles of the P5 veto, allow for countries to come together and make progress on critical issues?
It’s true that Russia being able to veto resolutions stifles the Security Council. And it’s a cruel irony that a country so blatantly violating the UN Charter wields that power. But think about the reverse scenario: would the P5 agree to Security Council resolutions if they didn’t have veto power? Would Russia, or China, or the United States for that matter ever agree to a resolution it couldn’t stand just because it got outvoted? The veto is a de jure representation of a de facto reality. If a major power doesn’t agree with a decision, they’re not going to enforce it just because a resolution says they should.
What’s remarkable, in fact, is just how often the Security Council, with all its disparate members, does seem to agree. Over the past four years, the UN Security Council has passed over 180 resolutions on many important issues. As Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield noted in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations last month, “It’s newsworthy when the veto power is used,” she said. But it is somehow “not newsworthy when we pass by consensus a resolution, when we pass a resolution supporting the Kenyan MSS into Haiti, we pass a resolution really redefining how we fund [african union] missions for peace support, or pass a resolution that was historic to deal with the impact of sanctions on humanitarian programs.”
In other words, the failures make the front page. The successes go unnoticed.
That’s true across the board. Very rarely do the famines the World Food Program averts make headlines, or the hundreds of thousands of children UNICEF saves. The coordination work that UNOCHA does among countless humanitarian actors is not sexy, but it’s necessary. The public fails to see the hundreds of other functions undertaken every day by the UN and its many specialized agencies, funds, and programs, from resettling refugees to detailing and documenting war crimes to preserving world landmarks. And we certainly don’t receive push alerts for “yet another day when we avoided a catastrophic world war because we have an official forum to yell at each other.”
The UN is a modern miracle. That it can be better is not a failure, but an opportunity. If we’re smart, we’ll seize it.
Podcast: Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead
China’s vertiginous rise over the past three decades has finally dawned on the Washington DC foreign policy blob. The hopes and dreams of China’s reform-and-opening period have transitioned to the fear and loathing of the Xi era, triggering broad concerns about America’s standing in the world today and in the future. Are we falling behind China in economic performance, research, dynamism and talent? Are America’s best days behind it?
For Dmitri Alperovitch, the answer is an emphatic “no.” The co-founder of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and the co-author of this year’s World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century, Alperovitch believes that the United States already has all the qualities to extend Pax Americana for another century. In his view, there is far too much cynicism in DC these days, and not enough of the optimism for the future that he bears with him from years as an entrepreneur and as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union.
Alperovitch and I discuss the qualities that America still has going for it, and how the media overemphasizes negative trends at the expense of a more holistic picture of America’s performance. We then talk about upgrading the Defense Department, the need for better procurement around emerging technologies, the advent of software complementing hardware on the battlefield, and the lessons we can learn from Ukraine’s experience fighting Russia.
🔊 Listen to “Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead”
The Orthogonal Bet: Complex economics is applying complex systems methods
In this episode, Sam speaks with J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist, complexity scientist, and economist. Doyne is currently the Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.
Doyne is also the author of the fascinating new book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World.
Sam wanted to explore Doyne’s intriguing history in complexity science, his new book, and the broader field of complexity economics. Together, they discuss the nature of simulation, complex systems, the world of finance and prediction, and even the differences between biological complexity and economic complexity. They also touch on Doyne’s experience building a small wearable computer in the 1970s that fit inside a shoe and was designed to beat the game of roulette.
🔊 Listen to “Complex economics is applying complex systems methods”
Lux Recommends
- Over here at Lux, our summer associate Dario Soatto writes in on “Scaling the Memory Wall.” “LLMs are computationally expensive: both training and inference requires processors to perform thousands of trillions of operations as fast as possible. Completing these countless vector and matrix multiplications is a challenge, but there’s an even more daunting, oft-overlooked problem: to use a model with tens to thousands of billions of parameters, we need to store hundreds of gigabytes of data close to the compute resources and constantly shuttle them back and forth to feed ALUs. Unfortunately, this task isn’t trivial.”
- I enjoyed this panorama profile of Tyler Tech, the rollup company that is the 900-pound gorilla in the local government software space, for everything from parking ticket management to indictments. “Before Tyler made software, it made cast-iron sewer pipes. The company, which has been public in one form or another since 1969, was previously an industrial conglomerate comprising at various stages a commercial explosives business, a chain of auto parts stores and its flagship, Tyler Pipe. A series of bad pivots and divestitures led to steep losses in the mid-1990s. Then a board member who had experience selling data-processing and election equipment to local governments pushed for a shift to civic computer services. ‘It was a little confusing my first year when the financial statements said ‘retail auto parts, software,’’ remembers Brian Miller, Tyler’s chief financial officer.”
- Our columnist Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (who wrote “Hacking Primordial Soups”) recommends the “@BasicallyHomeless” channel on YouTube, where ‘ever-increasingly complex and unhinged tech builds’ culminate in delightful and playful craziness. The most recent video is “I Built a Robot that Plays FPS Games” and it’s quite entertaining.
- Our columnist Michael Magnani has been following the FBI’s use of a fake cryptocurrency called NexFundAI to track down pump-and-dump schemers on the web. He also enjoyed reading Cameron Hudson’s look at CSIS on “What U.S. Elections Could Mean for Africa.” “Africans are decidedly more sanguine today about what any new U.S. administration will mean for them. Not since Barack Obama was first elected president have Africans believed that whoever was in the White House would materially affect their well-being. However, the notion that a U.S. president with African roots would somehow fundamentally elevate the continent’s importance in Washington was quickly dispelled by an Obama administration that did not stray far from traditional orthodoxy toward Africa…”
- We’ve recommended it before, but with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry partially to Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, this is the perfect opportunity to read The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut. The last part of the book covers DeepMind and the battle between Demis and Lee Sedol, the South Korean go player who would ultimately fail against the ever-increasing power of our AI overlords in the form of AlphaGo. In other Nobel Prize news, I also recommend Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which was part of the collection that won her literature’s top prize this week.
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
